RFARE

THE AGE OF THE GREAT RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSIES

THE sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the age of religious
controversy.

If you will notice you will find that almost everybody around you is
forever "talking economics" and discussing wages and hours of labor and
strikes in their relation to the life of the community, for that is the
main topic of interest of our own time.

The poor little children of the year 1600 or 1650 fared worse. They
never heard anything but "religion." Their heads were filled with
"predestination," "transubstantition," "free will," and a hundred other
queer words, expressing obscure points of "the true faith," whether
Catholic or Protestant. According to the desire of their parents they
were baptised Catholics or Lutherans or Calvinists or Zwinglians or
Anabaptists. They learned their theology from the Augsburg catechism,
composed by Luther, or from the "institutes of Christianity," written
by Calvin, or they mumbled the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith which were
printed in the English Book of Common Prayer, and they were told that
these alone represented the "True Faith."

They heard of the wholesale theft of church property perpetrated by King
Henry VIII, the much-married monarch of England, who made himself the
supreme head of the English church, and assumed the old papal rights of
appointing bishops and priests. They had a nightmare whenever some one
mentioned the Holy Inquisition, with its dungeons and its many torture
chambers, and they were treated to equally horrible stories of how a mob
of outraged Dutch Protestants had got hold of a dozen defenceless old
priests and hanged them for the sheer pleasure of killing those who
professed a different faith. It was unfortunate that the two contending
parties were so equally matched. Otherwise the struggle would have come
to a quick solution. Now it dragged on for eight generations, and it
grew so complicated that I can only tell you the most important details,
and must ask you to get the rest from one of the many histories of the
Reformation.

The great reform movement of the Protestants had been followed by a
thoroughgoing reform within the bosom of the Church. Those popes who
had been merely amateur humanists and dealers in Roman and Greek
antiquities, disappeared from the scene and their place was taken by
serious men who spent twenty hours a day administering those holy duties
which had been placed in their hands.

The lo